Wednesday, January 18, 2012

This site is Non-commercial ....

(Apologies to those of you who have read this post before but emails I have been getting suggest I should move this message to a more visible position. In view of the previous post it is also appropriate to emphasize this site's non-commercial nature.)

After running for ten years without any spam this site appears to be attractive to the advertising agencies - as I had yet another message trying to get me to take advertising. My reply this time is as follows:

I am puzzled as to why you should
think of contacting a 100% non-commercial web site which deals with family and
local history in Hertfordshire, although I can understand why you may not have
spotted the blog of 13
May which discusses the matter. You may also have been unaware that when the
URL was registered over 10 years ago the only generally available URLs in the UK
were .co.uk domains.

At first sight your client's business
has absolutely nothing to do with genealogy but after a little thought I
realised that there is a connection - but one that you would be unlikely to
mention in your adverts.

The people who visit my site are very
much concerned with the birth, marriage and death of their ancestors and other
relatives. Look at any family tree and you can find far too many examples of
people who have died of lung cancer, emphysema, liver cirrhosis, etc. In
addition there will be families that have run into problems from alcohol
addiction or from spending too much on legal addictive drugs. However your
client has a business plan that means it is not too worried about killing its
customers off as it can then make more money selling flowers for the funeral
....

Why not spend a little time thinking
out the consequences of your actions. Some years ago I did a calculation as to
the cost of my education at an expensive private school - the fees being paid
out of the profits my father made selling cigarettes. I came to the conclusion
that my father's customers shortened their lives by a total of over 200 years by
smoking, and many died an unpleasant death, in order to pay the
fees.

While you may feel the site might be
a suitable place for your clients to advertise, your client's business is not
one which could in any way be considered acceptable .

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This is the newsletter for the Genealogy in Hertfordshire Web site. Comments on this blog are moderated and may be transferred to the web site where appropriate. If you have a local or family history query you want answered you must use "Ask Chris" - See box in right hand column. Anonymous comments cannot be answered.